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‘No.’ Sebasten made no bones about the fact. ‘What did your “hideous” day encompass?’
Lizzie looped unsteady fingers through her fast-drying hair to push it back from her brow and muttered tightly. ‘My father told me to move out and get a job. I was very upset—’
‘At twenty-two years of age, you were still living at home and dependent on your family?’ Sebasten demanded in surprise. ‘Are you a student?’
Lizzie reddened. ‘No. I left school at eighteen. My father didn’t want me to work. He said he wanted me to have a good time!’
Sebasten scanned the delicate diamond pendant and bracelet she wore, conceding that they might well be real rather than the imitations he had assumed. Yet she didn’t speak with those strangulated vowel sounds that he associated with the true English upper classes, which meant that she was most probably from a family with money but no social pedigree. He was wryly amused that Ingrid, who was obsessed by a need to pigeon-hole people by their birth and their bank balance, had taught him to distinguish the old moneyed élite from the nouveau riche in London society.
‘And, no…having a good time did not cover my behaviour tonight!’ Lizzie advanced in defensive completion. ‘That was a one-off!’
‘So you were very upset at the prospect of having to keep yourself,’ Sebasten recapped with soft derision and innate suspicion that her apparent ignorance of who he was had been an act calculated to bring his guard down. ‘Is that why you came home with me?’
Startled by that offensive question, Lizzie sucked in a sudden sharp breath. As the fog of alcohol released her brain, she had already absorbed enough of her surroundings to recognise that she was in the home of a male who inhabited a very much wealthier and more rarefied world than her own. She lifted her chin. ‘No, to tell you the truth, now that I’m recovering my wits, I haven’t the foggiest idea why I came home with you because I don’t like you one little bit.’
A disconcerting smile flashed across Sebasten’s dark, brooding features. Angry green eyes the colour of precious emeralds were hurling defiance at him and her spine was as rigid as that of a queen in a medieval portrait. Unfortunately for her, though, her tangled hair and the bath towel supplied a ridiculous frame for that attempt to put him in his place.
The instant that incredible smile lit up his lean, strong features, Lizzie’s heartbeat went haywire and her mouth ran dry and she knew exactly why she had come home with him. If he kept his smart mouth closed, he was just about irresistible.
‘You’re angry that you made a fool of yourself,’ Sebasten retaliated without hesitation. ‘But I may have done you a big favour—’
Hot colour burned in Lizzie’s cheeks. ‘You call throwing the windows wide and torturing me in a cold shower doing me a favour?’
‘Yes…if the memory of that treatment stops you drinking that much again in the wrong company.’
Unused to a woman fighting with him, Sebasten savoured the sheer frustrated rage in her expressive face and his body hardened again in sudden urgent response. He wanted to flatten her back onto his bed and remind her of how irrelevant liking or anything else was when he touched her. His own reawakened desire startled him. Then her tangled torrent of hair was drying to gleam with rich gold and copper lights and that exotic and passionate face of hers still kept drawing him back. The intimate recollection of her lush little breasts and that lithe, slender body of hers shaking with hunger beneath his own was all the additional stimuli required to increase Sebasten’s level of arousal to one of supreme discomfort.
In the midst of swallowing the sting of that further comment destined to humble her, Lizzie felt the burn of Sebasten’s stunning dark golden eyes on her and what she had been about to say in an effort to save face died on her tongue. Stiffening, she shifted forward onto the edge of the bed. Suddenly aware of the high-voltage tension that had entered the atmosphere, she felt too jittery to handle her discomfiture and she settled her feet down onto the carpet.
‘It’s time I went home,’ she announced but she hesitated, afraid that the awful dizziness might return the instant she tried to stand up.
‘Where is home?’
‘No place right now,’ Lizzie admitted after a dismayed pause to appreciate the threatening reality. ‘I still have to find somewhere to live. Right now my luggage is parked at a friend’s place but I can’t stay there.’
Sebasten watched her stand up like a newborn baby animal afraid to test her long slim legs and then breathe in slow and deep. She plotted a passage to the bathroom and vanished from view. Closing the door, she caught her own reflection in a mirror and groaned out loud, lifting a trembling hand to her messy hair. Any pretence towards presentability was long gone, she reflected painfully. It was little wonder Sebasten had been sprawled in an armchair at a distance, talking down to her as if he were a very superior being.
And she guessed he was, she conceded, snatching up a comb from the counter of a built-in unit to begin disentangling her hair. He could have thrown her back out on the street. He could have taken advantage of her…well, not really, she decided, reckoning that Sebasten would prefer a live, moving woman to one showing all the animation of a corpse. And he had prevented her from making a very big mistake! Why didn’t she just admit that to herself? Her life was in a terrible mess and she shouldn’t even have been looking at Sebasten, never mind behaving like a tramp and coming home with him. She ought to be really grateful that nothing much had happened between them…
Only she wasn’t. Tears stung the back of Lizzie’s eyes and she blinked them back with stubborn determination. The ghastly truth was that she still found Sebasten incredibly attractive and she had blown it. Really blown her chances with him. There was nothing fanciable or appealing about a woman who had to be dumped in a shower to be brought out of a drunken collapse, naturally he was disgusted with her. But she was much angrier with herself than he could possibly have been. She had never been so attracted to any guy and she was convinced that alcohol had had very little to do with her extraordinary reaction to him. Why had she had to meet the most gorgeous guy of her life on the one night that she made a total, inexcusable ass of herself?
Wishing that she had thought to reclaim her clothing before she entered the bathroom and embarrassed to death as stray memories of her wanton behaviour broke free of her subconscious to torment her, Lizzie crept back into the bedroom.
Dawn was beginning to finger light through the heavy curtains. She had hoped that Sebasten would have fallen asleep or taken himself tactfully off somewhere else to allow her a fast and silent exit but no such luck was hers.
Sebasten was watching the television business news but the instant the door opened he vaulted upright and studied her. Still wrapped in the towel, hair brushed back from her scrubbed-clean face, she looked even more beautiful to Sebasten than she had looked earlier. Even pale, she had a fresh, natural appeal that pulled him against his own volition.
‘You might as well sleep in one of my guest rooms for what’s left of the night,’ Sebasten surprised himself by suggesting.
‘Thanks…but I’d better be going.’ Strained eyes centred on him in a look so brief he would have missed it had he not been watching her like a hawk. ‘I’ve taken up enough of your time.’
His mouth quirked. She sounded like a little girl who had attended a very bad party but was determined to leave saying all that was polite. He watched her stoop in harried movements to snatch up her clothes and shoes, mortification merging her freckles with a hot pink overlay of colour. Her inability to conceal her embarrassment was oddly touching.
‘How sober are you?’ Sebasten prompted lazily, eyes flaring to smouldering gold as her lush mouth opened and the tip of her tongue snaked out in a nervous flicker to moisten her full lower lip. Hunger, fierce and primitive as a knife at his groin, burned through him.
‘Totally wised up…’ Lizzie tried hard to smile, acknowledging her own foolishness.
‘Then stay with me…’ Sebasten murmured thickly.
Thrown by that renewed invitation, Lizzie gazed across the room, green eyes full of surprise and confusion. ‘But—’
‘Of course there are conditions,’ Sebasten warned, smooth as silk. ‘With your eyes closed, you have to be able to touch the tip of your nose with one finger and you only get one chance.’
An involuntary laugh escaped Lizzie as she looked back at him. Still clad only in the jeans, he was drop-dead gorgeous: all sleek, bronzed, hair-roughened skin, lean muscle and masculinity. Even the five o’clock shadow now roughening his strong jawline only added to his sheer impact. Feeling just then that it would be more sensible to close her eyes and deny herself the pleasure of staring at him as though he had just dropped down from heaven for a visit, Lizzie strove to play the game and performed the exercise even though at that point she had every intention of leaving.
‘Then you have to open your eyes again and walk in a straight line to the door,’ Sebasten instructed.
Growing amusement gripping her, Lizzie set out for the door.
‘Full marks,’ Sebasten quipped.
Lizzie spun round. ‘You’ve got to do it too.’
Disconcerted, Sebasten raised a brow in scornful dismissal of that challenge.
‘You take yourself very seriously.’ Lizzie watched him with keen intensity because it was one of the most important things she had learnt about him. ‘You don’t even like me to suggest that you might be anything less than totally in control.’
‘I’m a man. That’s normal,’ Sebasten drawled.
Not to Lizzie, it wasn’t. She was used to younger men who were more relaxed about their image and the differences between the sexes but she could see that Sebasten inhabited another category altogether. The strong, brooding, macho type unlikely to spill his guts no matter how tough the going got. Not her type at all, she told herself in urgent consolation.
Sebasten strode in a direct line to the door but only because where she was was where he wanted to be at that instant. ‘Satisfied?’
‘Yes…we are two sober people…and I need to go and get dressed.’ Breathless at finding herself that close to him again, Lizzie coloured, heartbeat thumping at what felt like the base of her throat.
‘I’ll only take it all off again,’ Sebasten threatened in a dark, deep undertone of warning that sent a tingle of delicious threat down her taut spine.
‘Walking in a straight line to the door when you asked was just my effort to lighten the atmosphere,’ Lizzie shared awkwardly.
‘While every lingering look you give me tells me how much you still want me,’ Sebasten delivered without an instant of hesitation.
‘You’ve got some ego!’ Lizzie condemned in disconcertion.
‘Earned…like my reputation,’ Sebasten slotted in, closing his lean, sure hands to her slender waist to tilt her forward. ‘We’ll conduct an experiment—’
‘No…no experiments,’ Lizzie cut in on a higher pitch of nervous stress. ‘I don’t do stuff like this, Sebasten. I don’t have one-night stands. I don’t sleep with guys I’ve only just met…in fact, I haven’t got much experience at all and you’d probably find the business news more riveting—’
Sebasten recognised one of the qualities that had drawn him to her but which he had failed to identify: a certain degree of innocence. Fired by the rare event of being challenged to persuade a woman into his bed, he focused his legendary negotiating skills on Lizzie. ‘I’m riveted by you,’ Sebasten incised with decisive conviction. ‘Right from the first moment I saw you at the club.’
‘Stop kidding me…’ Skin warming, Lizzie connected with his stunning golden eyes and trembled, wanting to believe, her battered self-esteem hungry for that reassurance. That close to him, it was difficult to breathe and the warm, clean male scent of his skin flared her nostrils with a familiarity that tugged at her every sense. She wanted to lean into him, crush the tender tips of her swollen breasts into the hard wall of his chest, feel that wide, sexy mouth ravish her own again.
‘I’m not kidding. One look and I was hooked.’ Sebasten gazed down at her from below the dense fringe of his black lashes and just smiled and that was the moment she was lost, that was the moment when any pretence of self-control ran aground on the sheer strength of her response to him. Her pulses racing, Lizzie felt the megawatt burn of that smile blaze through her and she angled into him in a helpless movement. When his mouth came down on hers again, the heat of that sensual assault was pure, addictive temptation.
In the midst of that kiss, Sebasten carried her back to the bed and peeled away the towel. He cupped her breasts, bent his arrogant dark head over the pale pink distended peaks and used his knowing mouth and his even more knowing hands to give her pleasure.
‘Are you protected?’ he asked.
‘Yes…’ She had started taking contraceptive pills a month after she had begun dating Connor but she crushed that unwelcome association back out of her mind again, the bitterness that had haunted her in recent weeks set behind her. A fresh start, a new and more productive life, Sebasten. She was more than ready for those challenges when Sebasten was giving her the impression that he felt much the same way that she did.
As he slid off the bed in one fluid movement to dispense with his jeans, her cheeks reddened and she turned her head away while wicked but self-conscious anticipation licked along her every nerve-ending.
He came down beside her again and she let her hands rise up over his powerful torso. She had never really wanted to explore a man before but she could not resist her need to touch him. Her fingers roved from the satin-smooth hardness of his shoulders to graze through the short black whorls of hair hazing his pectorals to the warm tautness of his stomach, feeling his muscles flex in response.
‘Don’t stop there, pethi mou,’ Sebasten husked.
Lizzie got more daring, let her fingers follow the intriguing furrow of silky black hair over his stomach and discovered the male power of him with a jolt of mingled dismay and curiosity. He was smooth and hard but there was definitely too much of him.
‘This way,’ Sebasten murmured with concealed amusement, initially startled by her clumsiness and then adapting to teach her what he liked. It was a lesson he had never had cause to give before but it sent his desire for her surging even higher.
That intimate exploration made Lizzie feel all hot and quivery and she pressed her thighs together on the disturbing ache stirring at the very heart of her. When he teased at her swollen lower lip before letting his tongue delve into the tender interior of her mouth in a darting foray that imitated a far more elemental possession she trembled against his lean, strong body, feverish hot craving gripping her.
His breathing fractured, Sebasten dragged his mouth from hers to gaze down at her with fiery golden eyes. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so hot for a woman as I am for you.’
He pulled her to him and his expert hands traced the beaded sensitivity of her breasts. She couldn’t stay still any more. Tiny little tremors were racking her. Her breath was rasping into her dry throat, pulses thrumming, heart pounding. At the apex of her legs he traced the moist, needy secret of her femininity and she moaned out loud, couldn’t help herself. The pleasure was dark and deep and terrifyingly intense. He controlled her and she didn’t care; she just didn’t want him to stop. The bitter-sweet torment of sensation sizzled through every fibre of her writhing body with increasing intensity until she was on the edge of a desperation as new to her as intimacy.
‘I need you…now,’ Sebasten growled.
Rising over her, he tipped her up with strong hands and came down over her. She barely had time to learn the feeling of his urgent demand for entrance before he plunged his throbbing shaft into her slick heat and groaned with an earthy pleasure at the tightness of his welcome.
The momentary stab of unexpected pain made Lizzie jerk and cry out but the passionate urgency controlling her allowed no competition. Too much in the grip of the feverish need he had induced, she gave him a blank look when he stilled in questioning acknowledgement of that cry. Her whole body craved him with a force of hungry excitement that nothing could have haltered and she arched up to him in frantic encouragement until he succumbed to that invitation and ground his body into hers again, sheathing himself fully and sending another shockwave of incredible desire through her. His pagan rhythm drove her to the edge of ecstasy and then flung her over the wild, breathtaking peak before the glorious, peaceful aftermath of fulfilment claimed her. As he reached his own shuddering release, she wrapped her arms round him tight.
‘Sublime,’ Sebasten muttered hoarsely in Greek and then he rolled back and hauled her over him to study her flushed and shaken face, the unguarded softness and warmth in her green eyes as she looked back at him. He pushed his fingers into her tumbling hair and tugged her back down to him so that he could kiss her again. ‘I think we’re going to do this again and again…and again.’
‘Hmm…’ Lizzie was more mesmerised by him than ever now. She scanned his lean, strong face and let her fingertips roam from his shoulder to curl into his tousled black hair instead. His features were so masculine: all taut angles from the clean slant of his high cheekbones to the proud jut of his nose and the blue-shadowed roughness of his hard jawline. His stunning gaze gleamed lazy gold beneath the semi-screening sweep of his spiky lashes. She just wanted to smile and smile and smile like an idiot.
She had been a virgin, he was sure of it, Sebasten thought, but he wasn’t quite sure enough to broach the issue. He recalled her clueless approach to making love to him and amusement filled him. A split-second later the renewed ache of desire prompted him to kiss her again and it was the last even semi-serious thought he had for some hours.
Lizzie wakened with a start, feeling horribly queasy.
Sebasten was asleep. Sliding as quietly as she could from the bed, she fled to the bathroom, where nature took its course with punishing efficiency. Humbly grateful that Sebasten had not witnessed the final reward for her own foolishness, Lizzie got into the shower and used his shampoo to wash her hair. Even the already familiar smell of his shampoo turned her inside-out with intense longing. She felt weak, frighteningly vulnerable and yet crazily happy too. Yet hadn’t she honestly believed that she was in love with Connor? What did that say about her? Connor had never lowered her to the level of sniffing shampoo bottles. Connor had never turned her brain to mush with one smile, never made her feel scared…
Yes, she was scared, Lizzie acknowledged as she made use of the hair-dryer and surveyed her own hot, guilty face in the mirror. She was in wholly uncharted territory and she was scared that Sebasten would just think of her as a one-night stand and would not want to see her again. Wouldn’t that be just what she deserved? After all, how much respect could he have for a woman who just fell into his arms the very first night she met him? A woman, moreover, whom he had had to sober up first from the most disgusting state of inebriation. Shame and confusion enveloped Lizzie as she recalled how she had behaved and how he had reacted: angry and sardonic but essentially decent in that he had looked after her.
In the bedroom next door, Sebasten asked himself if he ought to be sympathetic towards her being ill and decided that support or sympathy might only encourage her to repeat the offence in the future. No, he definitely didn’t want to risk that. He might be almost convinced that she was not an habitual drunk but it was his nature to be cautious with women. So they had a future? He could not remember ever thinking that with a woman before and it really spooked him.
Springing out of bed, Sebasten lifted the phone and ordered breakfast and might well have made it into the bathroom to join her in the shower had he not stood on her tiny handbag where it had been abandoned on the floor the night before.
With a muttered curse as he wondered whether he had broken anything inside it, he swept it up and the contents fell out because the zipper hadn’t been closed. Reaching for the items, he thrust them back into the bag and in that rather impatient handling her driver’s licence slipped out of her purse. He studied her photograph with a smile and was in the act of putting it back when he saw the name.
Liza Denton.
What the hell was Lizzie doing with another woman’s driving licence in her possession? Sebasten stilled with a dark frown until he looked back at the photograph and the truth exploded on him with all the efficacy of an earthquake beneath his feet. Lizzie was usually short for Elizabeth but mightn’t it also be a diminutive for Liza? In thunderous disbelief, he recalled the club manager pointing out the small blonde on the dance floor the night before. It dawned on him then that the man might well have been pointing at Lizzie instead, for the two women had been standing together.
In a rare state of shock, Sebasten stared back down at the photo. Lizzie was Liza Denton, the vindictive, man-hungry tramp who had driven his own kid brother to self-destruction. Sebasten shuddered. Not only had Lizzie pretended to have only the most tenuous acquaintance with Connor, but she had also outright lied by giving him a false surname! Her awareness of the notoriety of her own name and her deliberate concealment of her true identity was, in his opinion, absolute proof of her guilt.
Lizzie Denton was a class act too, Sebasten acknowledged as he threw on clothes at speed, ferocious rage rising in direct proportion to the raw distaste now slicing through him. That he should have slept with the woman whom poor Connor had loved to distraction! That he himself should then have been taken in to the extent of believing her to be a virgin! Sebasten snatched in a harsh breath.
On top of that first shattering discovery the conviction that the judgement and intelligence that he prided himself on should have fallen victim to a clever act was even more galling. Of course, it had been an act calculated to impress! So calculating a woman would be well aware that, for a male as cynical and bone-deep Greek as he was, a pretence of sexual innocence had immense pulling power. For he had liked that idea, hadn’t he? The idea that he was the first to make her feel like that? The first to stamp that look of shellshocked admiration on her lovely face?
And why had she done it? Well, hadn’t she told him that herself? And very prettily too with tears glistening in her big green eyes. Her adoring daddy had pulled the plug on her credit line and she had to be desperate to find a rich and generous boyfriend to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, sooner than accept the hard grind of the daily employment that others less fortunate took for granted as their lot in life. Then Lizzie Denton had not bargained on dealing with Connor’s big brother, had she?
In the fiery space of a moment, Sebasten knew exactly what he was about to do and little of his usual caution was in evidence. He would play her silly games until she was wholly in his power and then when she least expected it he would dump her as publicly as she had dumped Connor. He would repay lies with lies, hurt with hurt and pain with pain. It might not be the towering revenge he had quite envisaged but then why should her entire family suffer for her sins when it was evident that her father had already repudiated his daughter in disgust? It would be a much more personal act of vengeance…
With a chilling smile hardening his handsome mouth, Sebasten knocked on the bathroom door, cast it open only a few inches, for he did not yet trust himself to look her in the eye without betraying the sheer rage still powering him. ‘I’ll see you for breakfast downstairs…’